1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a shielded wire harness.
2. Description of the Related Art
For connecting machines such as an inverter unit and a motor in an electric vehicle, a shielded wire harness is used. As a wire harness of this type, there is known a wire harness structured such that wire-side terminals are fixed to the end portions of the conductors of shielded wires, the wire-side terminals are connected to equipment-side terminals disposed within a shield case of equipment, and the shield layers of the shielded wires are connected to the shield case through conductive connecting members (see JP-A-11-026093).
However, in the wire harness, an operation to insert the wire-side terminals into the shield case and an operation to connect the connecting members to the shield case must be repeated respectively the same number of times as the number of terminal poles (that is, the number of shielded wires), which takes much time and labor.
In view of the above, there is proposed a wire harness structured in the following manner: that is, there are used wires including no shield layer; and, the wires are collectively covered with a cylindrical-shaped flexible shielding member made of braided wires obtained by braiding metal fine wires together. According to the wire harness of a collective shield type, an operation to connect the shielding portions (shielding members) to the shield case may be executed only once regardless of the number of wires, which can enhance the operation efficiency of the wire harness.
The above-mentioned wire harness, which is structured such that more than one wire is covered with a shielding member, in some cases, is used in such a manner that it is exposed outside the vehicle body. In this case, in order to protect the wire harness from bounced stones and the like, there is employed a structure in which the wires and shielding member are stored in an armored case made of high-strength material such as metal.
However, to provide the armored case separately from the wire harness causes a problem that not only the number of parts and the number of assembling steps increase but also the cost of the apparatus increases.